This invention relates to an automatic setup system for television cameras and more particularly automatic setup for color television cameras.
In the present TV color camera systems setup adjustments are located in many different places. Some of the setup adjustments are in the camera head, some located in the base equipment, when used, and some are remoted to the base equipment from the camera head to allow monitoring facilities to make the adjustment. Most of the setup adjustments are usually located in the camera head or when base equipment is used, in the base equipment. The total number of setup adjustments is often 80 or more. There are primary setup functions such as fine registration, coarse registration, geometry, shading, black level, white level, etc. There are within each primary setup function a plurality of secondary setup functions. For example, fine registration can have fourteen setup functions for adjustment of the red camera video to match the green camera video. The fourteen functions are horizontal centering, horizontal size, horizontal linearity, horizontal tilt, horizontal bow, horizontal keystone, horizontal pincushion, vertical centering vertical size, vertical linearity, vertical tilt, vertical bow, vertical keystone, and vertical pincushion. These setup adjustments are usually made via potentiometer controls which are tightly packed together and usually involve concentric controls. This type packing of the controls adds to the size and weight of the base equipment and the camera and further complicates the adjustments. For small cameras it is convenient to move the camera to the monitoring facilities for the purpose of making the adjustments. In the larger cameras, some of the adjustments have to be remoted to the base equipment where the monitoring facilities are available. The remoting of the controls typically includes separate conductors through a cable to each of the potentiometers. This in itself can cause instability. The labor involved in setting up the camera is considerable and therefore it is desirable to find a more suitable means for performing the setup adjustments. Since there are many adjustments to be made during the useful life of eqiupment and these adjustments are time consuming and require judgment by the operator, it is highly desirable to provide a system for making these adjustments automatically.
To accomplish these adjustments automatically requires some means for detecting the errors and for producing error correction signals. The method used to detect the error and the way in which the errors are handled to provide correction signals determines in a large part the performance of the overall system and the time it takes to make adjustments. While some automatic adjustments have been made, these adjustments are accomplished by measuring or detecting the errors for a given one control for one secondary function and controlling this one secondary function. If one were to extend this process to a system for all of the setup controls, this process of measuring the errors and adjusting the control for each secondary function, remeasuring to detect the errors for the next secondary function and correcting the errors, and repeating this for all the secondary controls sequentially would take a considerable length of time. Since the controls interact with each other, there would also be extra time for repeating the remeasuring and correction of errors caused when correcting the other individual secondary controls or functions. It is therefore desirable to provide a more efficient manner of handling a multiplicity of controls.